Heavy weapons which are provided with, for example, a gun such as a cannon, e.g. the cannon of a tank turret, must be supplied with munitions rounds from a munitions magazine or bunker in the vehicle and to this end means can be provided for withdrawing each round from the magazine, delivering it to the region of the breech and fbr inserting the round into the breech before firing.
An automatic loading system for this purpose is described, for example, in German open application No. 29 48 146. In this arrangement the munitions magazine is formed in a pod or compartment at the rear of the turret and the magazine stores the munitions in a circulating system progressively advancing the munitions rounds to a fixed position for each of two munitions bunkers from which the rounds are extracted and inserted into the breech.
This system has the disadvantage that for the insertion of each round into the breech of the gun, it is necessary for the entire circulating magazine to be activated and all of the rounds thereof moved in order to position the single round to be fed into the aforementioned fixed position. When this round reaches the fixed position, the driven mass must be brought to a stop. The displacement and stopping of the circulating magazine is time and energy consuming, requires a large drive facility and poses a danger within the vehicle.
Even more significant, in some cases, is the disadvantage which arises when munition rounds of different types may have to be selected for a particular attack on a given target. If this round is not the next round in the sequence, the magazine must be driven until the appropriate round reaches the location at which it is to be extracted from the magazine. This is especially time-consuming and requires that the entire magazine by driven, possibly over practically the entire path thereof until the desired round reaches the extraction location.
Obviously this system is expensive to fabricate, utilizes space in the munitions pod or compartment which might be better utilized for additional munitions, creates problems with maintenance and repair and may result in long downtimes for maintenance.
Another system utilizing circulating rounds in a magazine is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,724,324, this system suffering some of the same disadvantages as have been ascribed to the arrangement of the German open application No. 29 48 146.
Mention may also be made, in this connection, of German Auslegeschrift No. 23 49 185 which discloses arrays of munitions bunkers on either side of a magazine but is also highly space consuming and inconvenient to use although it does not have all of the problems associated with systems in which the entire body of munitions rounds of a particular bunker must be displaced in order to allow extraction of a single round.